Things I read this fortnight
Apr. 1st, 2025 08:50 pm[cw: apocalypse, corporate bullshit, (fairly mild) illness]
[not an April Fools post]
( Read more... )
[not an April Fools post]
( Read more... )
Miscellaneous Money Stuff
May. 17th, 2024 11:04 am[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section from Moody's)
all of the other immortals must be so mad at this guy
you can't just fucking *tell* people you're 943 years old, dude, we've been *over* this
(on the other hand, it doesn't seem like anyone is believing it, so maybe you *can* just tell people you're 943 years old)
---
[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Sridhar Natarajan)
man, imagine having recourse when your financial advisor advises you to break the law
---
[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Elizabeth Lopatto)
---
[Bloomberg] (by Matt Levine)
oh my god
Moody’s tool has revealed thousands of directors who are as young as zero or older than the world’s longest-living person on record. One listed director — at 943 years old — would have been born in the 11th century. This director is allegedly a minority shareholder and beneficial owner of a Belgium-based business services firm that incorporated in 2018.
all of the other immortals must be so mad at this guy
you can't just fucking *tell* people you're 943 years old, dude, we've been *over* this
(on the other hand, it doesn't seem like anyone is believing it, so maybe you *can* just tell people you're 943 years old)
---
[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Sridhar Natarajan)
Wall Street firms usually grumble in private after getting punished by regulators. Anthony Melchiorre’s Chatham Asset Management is dragging its advisers into a public legal battle for $100 million.
The $6 billion hedge fund is demanding that Adviser Compliance Associates not only cover Chatham’s costs for settling a US probe last year, but also damage to its business. In an unusual lawsuit, Chatham claims the outside consultant, founded by former regulators, failed to prevent trading practices that ran afoul of authorities. …
“Chatham sought, received and followed advice from ACA that certain trading practices did not run afoul of the SEC’s cross-trading rules,” Melchiorre, 56, said in a statement through a spokesman. “ACA gave it improper advice and failed to flag these trades as problematic.” The hedge fund intends to vigorously pursue the matter, holding ACA accountable, he said.
---
[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Elizabeth Lopatto)
“Short … [Reddit],” wrote one r/Wall StreetBets user. “They have not proven that this user base or data set can be monetized.”
---
[Bloomberg] (by Matt Levine)
By the way, there’s a very funny anecdote in Scott Patterson’s Chaos Kings in which Nassim Nicholas Taleb goes for a walk with some colleagues at Universa, Mark Spitznagel’s black-swan fund. “Taleb, sweating in his professorial jacket in Miami’s eighty-degree heat, spotted a penny on the pavement in front of a parked steamroller — and picked it up, laughing at the inside joke.” The sort of thing that could only happen to Taleb.
oh my god
Comment and Link Roundup: June 1, 2023
Jun. 1st, 2023 02:37 pmComments on my own posts:
Tips on Offline-First Smartphones, 2023 Edition [one comment on Dreamwidth, one comment on Tumblr]
---
Comments on other people's posts:
[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
nuclearspaceheater) General life improvements of weightlifting.
[cw: illness, (fairly mild) venting] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mindstalk) The spirit (and not just the letter) of mask rules.
[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byunprettyextra; in response to etirabys) How to help archive Imgur. (Though Imgur has since started its deletions, the archiving project continues.)
[cw: embarrassment squick, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byhjartasalt; in response to nuclearspaceheater) American hegemony and (sort-of)-multi-currency cash registers.
[cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP bysigmaleph) How to (maybe) know your sleep latency.
---
Links:
[arguably cw: amnesia] [Baturin; Wayback] (by Daniil Baturin) A review of a Windows-ripoff Linux distro from 2003.
Laugh-rule entries:
[WordPress; Wayback] (by Bret Devereaux)
[Mastodon; Wayback] (h/t Seebs)
(here's the alt text on that image in case you want to stick it into Google Traduction:
[WordPress; Wayback] (by Crow)
[Know Your Meme; Wayback]
[cw: illness] [Armbrust; Wayback] Review of a terrible surgical mask.
[AO3; Wayback] (by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
seasparks) I don't go here, I was just wiki-walking, but:
Tips on Offline-First Smartphones, 2023 Edition [one comment on Dreamwidth, one comment on Tumblr]
---
Comments on other people's posts:
[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[cw: illness, (fairly mild) venting] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by
mindstalk) The spirit (and not just the letter) of mask rules.[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[cw: embarrassment squick, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
sigmaleph) How to (maybe) know your sleep latency.---
Links:
[arguably cw: amnesia] [Baturin; Wayback] (by Daniil Baturin) A review of a Windows-ripoff Linux distro from 2003.
Laugh-rule entries:
[WordPress; Wayback] (by Bret Devereaux)
This is the third part of the second part of our three(ish) part look at the governing structures of the Greek polis (I, IIa, IIb). At some point I promise I will write a series whose organization does not look like a parody of itself.
[Mastodon; Wayback] (h/t Seebs)
(here's the alt text on that image in case you want to stick it into Google Traduction:
ARRÊTEZ L'ANGLAIS – L'ANGLAIS N'EST PAS CENSÉE ÊTRE UNE LANGUE INTERNATIONALE – DES ANNÉES D’ANGLAIS et pourtant AUCUN INTERÊT parce qu’on peut regarder la version du film doublée par Kev Adams – Tu veux dire des trucs en anglais pour rigoler? On a un outil pour Ça, Ça s'appelle «GOOGLE TRADUCTION» – «Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Will, will Will will Will Will's will? All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life» – Indistinguable d'un AVC REGARDE ce que les Anglais te demande de Respecter, avec tous les cours & voyages linguistiques qu’on fait pour les comprendre (Ce sont de VRAIS mots anglais, parlé par de VRAIS Anglais): Embezzling ????? gobbledygook ??????? discombobulated ????????????????? «The bamboozled children skedaddled»
Ils se sont foutus de notre gueule putaingue
[WordPress; Wayback] (by Crow)
In promoting her new book, the author also made a few choice memes. I can’t think of any other way to describe them.
They immediately without context are my kind of humour. Clickhole could post this and I’d send it to all my friends. Levelling is, as a reminder, a sometimes used term to describe killing god. These stock photos are very persuasive in getting me to love god, I’ll admit. I’ll say the unlevel memes are also quite tumblr ‘I dreamed of this meme and now it is real’ style.
[Know Your Meme; Wayback]
[cw: illness] [Armbrust; Wayback] Review of a terrible surgical mask.
"And look at the stare in his eyes. I mean, the woman is intense, but this dude, like something's going on there, man. It's the face of someone actually receiving the coronavirus into their body."
[AO3; Wayback] (by
seasons of crappy Netflix that were deemed sufficiently bad to allow Canadian access to them
Tags:
- 101uses for infrastructureless computers,
- adventures in human capitalism,
- disappointed resident of the future,
- exercise,
- fanfic,
- home of the brave,
- in which brin has a job,
- language,
- laugh rule,
- linux,
- medical: diseases,
- medical: diseases: covid19,
- our home and cherished land,
- overly literal interpretations,
- psa,
- reactionblogging,
- roundups,
- smartphones
Today's the day, part ~4
Jan. 17th, 2023 12:23 pm(part 3)
---
Circa 2022-10-21:
holy shit
apparently there was a bug in Whisper that was causing it to run far more slowly than it had any right to, *especially* on CPU
it's fixed now
(also they've added an option to change how many CPU threads a Whisper instance uses, so if you have 4 threads you can just use 4 and not have to run a pair of Whispers to make use of it all)
I ran a quad-threaded Whisper overnight on 6.5 hours of audio, and nine hours later when I checked on it again *it was already done*
2022-11-19, 10:30 AM:
I haven't run direct head-to-head tests, but it seems as if quad-threaded Whisper is *more* than twice as fast as dual-threaded? It also seems--and *this* makes intuitive sense--that "--condition_on_previous_text=False" runs more slowly (but is more likely to notice when someone starts talking after a long stretch of background noise).
I made the mistake, 35 hours ago, of putting a second one on because it was nearly bedtime and the first one (which was not conditioning on previous text) only had about forty minutes left. The first one's not done, and the second one (conditioned on previous text) has only made it through about 80 minutes.
OTOH, that's making me wonder if my octa-threaded smartphone would be a better cruncher than I'd expected. Perhaps I'll try it at the end of the workweek.
2022-11-19, 11:00 AM:
Ah, you press *ctrl-Z* in a terminal window to pause its active process, and *fg* to resume. Good: it really seemed like there ought to be a way of doing that, but I was having trouble finding it.
I'll test it on Whisper once I've got a Whisper instance running that *wouldn't* lose hours of work if it went wrong. (Not the whole 35 hours--it writes the transcripts to disk at the end of each file, not at the end of the sequence of files--but still.)
2022-11-19, 11:30 AM:
That first one finished a file and moved on to the next. I tried pausing and resuming it. CPU monitor says it's running, but it's not outputting anything to the terminal. It's possible it just hasn't done anything worth outputting yet, though.
A bit of poking at the Termux wiki suggests that Termux isn't very conducive to using Whisper, in any case.
Hmm. It's not the only computer in the house with eight threads. Come to think of it, I wonder if Mom would let me run a password-protected VM inside *her* laptop...
2022-11-19, 11:47 AM:
Oh hey, it's started outputting. I guess I'll try poking Termux to see if it's easier than it looks from the wiki.
2022-11-19, 12:00 PM:
It can't install because...my version of Python is too *new*? Well, that's not the error message I expected.
Is my August Termux backup an old enough Python version...yes. Let's try reverting to that...
2022-11-19, 12:10 PM:
It still says it can't install torch, but no longer claims that the reason is because of having Python 3.11.
2022-11-19, 12:40 PM:
Turns out that you *can* install torch on Termux, but you have to run
(Another 380 MB of disc space for Rust. Man, this shit is *expensive*. Well, what else was I using my remaining 4.5 GB of internal storage for; as for the external storage, Brother bought me a 512 GB microSD as a birthday present and it's in the mail.)
2022-11-19, 12:55 PM:
"CANNOT LINK EXECUTABLE 'rustc': library 'libLLVM-15.so' not found"
...what if I install libllvm?
2022-11-19, 1:50 PM:
...and aarch64-linux-android-ar...
...no, Termux apt doesn't recognise that one. Hmm.
No, not that either. Binutils?
2022-11-19, 2:30 PM:
And once again I have run out of error messages but it's still failing. I wonder what happens if I do something about the warning that
2022-11-20, 11:30 AM:
(Meanwhile, on the TV-brain front: suspending the process, understandably enough, doesn't free up RAM. Therefore, pausability does not help.)
2022-12-01, 10:30 AM:
Upon closer inspection a few days back, I noticed there *was* another error message.
I got a chance to try the workaround late last night. Half an hour later it was still working at building a wheel for
This morning I checked on it, and...it says everything completed successfully.
Well then. Let's try it out.
2022-12-01, 11:50 AM:
Holy shit, just *unzipping an audio folder* so that Whisper would have something to chew on took like an hour. Not a great sign for how fast this is going to be, though there may have been extenuating circumstances (for one thing, the zip is on the external storage and the unzipped folder is on the internal storage).
Anyway, Material Files has finished that part now, so here we go.
2022-12-01, 12:00 PM:
It...doesn't parse wildcards? Unlike on Linux?
Oh, it's because the unzipping left the folder more nested than I expected, and actually the cd should be
2022-12-01, 12:05 PM:
I checked Material Files and internal-storage folder 2022-09-19-v1 has been created, so that's a good sign.
2022-12-02, 12:30 AM:
We're twelve and a half hours in. The first speech in this clip occurs two and a half minutes in. It hasn't outputted any progress to the terminal yet.
I'll let it run overnight mostly out of curiosity, but currently I expect that this device cannot materially contribute to a grid computer. I think tomorrow I'll revert Termux to that August backup again and update from there, freeing up the large quantities of space currently being spent on Whisper and its prerequisites.
The good news is that the phone is not appreciably warm, so I'm not frying my battery.
2022-12-02, 12:30 PM:
We're now at 24.5 hours real-time, and...huh, 11.5 minutes. It did actually manage something.
Still, it looks like my initial hypothesis (before multi-threading) that the phone's effectiveness would be roughly on par with the TV brain was right, and I agree with yesterday-me that it's not worth including this in my available compute.
Neat proof of concept, though.
---
Circa 2022-10-21:
holy shit
apparently there was a bug in Whisper that was causing it to run far more slowly than it had any right to, *especially* on CPU
it's fixed now
(also they've added an option to change how many CPU threads a Whisper instance uses, so if you have 4 threads you can just use 4 and not have to run a pair of Whispers to make use of it all)
I ran a quad-threaded Whisper overnight on 6.5 hours of audio, and nine hours later when I checked on it again *it was already done*
2022-11-19, 10:30 AM:
I haven't run direct head-to-head tests, but it seems as if quad-threaded Whisper is *more* than twice as fast as dual-threaded? It also seems--and *this* makes intuitive sense--that "--condition_on_previous_text=False" runs more slowly (but is more likely to notice when someone starts talking after a long stretch of background noise).
I made the mistake, 35 hours ago, of putting a second one on because it was nearly bedtime and the first one (which was not conditioning on previous text) only had about forty minutes left. The first one's not done, and the second one (conditioned on previous text) has only made it through about 80 minutes.
OTOH, that's making me wonder if my octa-threaded smartphone would be a better cruncher than I'd expected. Perhaps I'll try it at the end of the workweek.
2022-11-19, 11:00 AM:
Ah, you press *ctrl-Z* in a terminal window to pause its active process, and *fg* to resume. Good: it really seemed like there ought to be a way of doing that, but I was having trouble finding it.
I'll test it on Whisper once I've got a Whisper instance running that *wouldn't* lose hours of work if it went wrong. (Not the whole 35 hours--it writes the transcripts to disk at the end of each file, not at the end of the sequence of files--but still.)
2022-11-19, 11:30 AM:
That first one finished a file and moved on to the next. I tried pausing and resuming it. CPU monitor says it's running, but it's not outputting anything to the terminal. It's possible it just hasn't done anything worth outputting yet, though.
A bit of poking at the Termux wiki suggests that Termux isn't very conducive to using Whisper, in any case.
Hmm. It's not the only computer in the house with eight threads. Come to think of it, I wonder if Mom would let me run a password-protected VM inside *her* laptop...
2022-11-19, 11:47 AM:
Oh hey, it's started outputting. I guess I'll try poking Termux to see if it's easier than it looks from the wiki.
liveblog of Termux troubleshooting, click to open (even if you're viewing this post directly and not on a Dreamwidth /read page)
2022-11-19, 12:00 PM:
It can't install because...my version of Python is too *new*? Well, that's not the error message I expected.
Is my August Termux backup an old enough Python version...yes. Let's try reverting to that...
2022-11-19, 12:10 PM:
It still says it can't install torch, but no longer claims that the reason is because of having Python 3.11.
2022-11-19, 12:40 PM:
Turns out that you *can* install torch on Termux, but you have to run
pkg install python-torch instead of going through pip. Now the error message is about missing Rust, which the Whisper readme discusses as a common error.(Another 380 MB of disc space for Rust. Man, this shit is *expensive*. Well, what else was I using my remaining 4.5 GB of internal storage for; as for the external storage, Brother bought me a 512 GB microSD as a birthday present and it's in the mail.)
2022-11-19, 12:55 PM:
"CANNOT LINK EXECUTABLE 'rustc': library 'libLLVM-15.so' not found"
...what if I install libllvm?
2022-11-19, 1:50 PM:
...and aarch64-linux-android-ar...
...no, Termux apt doesn't recognise that one. Hmm.
cargo install aarch64-linux-android-ar?No, not that either. Binutils?
2022-11-19, 2:30 PM:
And once again I have run out of error messages but it's still failing. I wonder what happens if I do something about the warning that
wheel isn't installed and it's having to use legacy setup...2022-11-20, 11:30 AM:
(Meanwhile, on the TV-brain front: suspending the process, understandably enough, doesn't free up RAM. Therefore, pausability does not help.)
more troubleshooting
2022-12-01, 10:30 AM:
Upon closer inspection a few days back, I noticed there *was* another error message.
I got a chance to try the workaround late last night. Half an hour later it was still working at building a wheel for
tokenizers, and I went to bed and left it to it.This morning I checked on it, and...it says everything completed successfully.
Well then. Let's try it out.
2022-12-01, 11:50 AM:
Holy shit, just *unzipping an audio folder* so that Whisper would have something to chew on took like an hour. Not a great sign for how fast this is going to be, though there may have been extenuating circumstances (for one thing, the zip is on the external storage and the unzipped folder is on the internal storage).
Anyway, Material Files has finished that part now, so here we go.
cd /sdcard/2022-09-19 && whisper *.mp3 --model small.en --threads 8 --output_dir /sdcard/2022-09-19-v12022-12-01, 12:00 PM:
It...doesn't parse wildcards? Unlike on Linux?
Oh, it's because the unzipping left the folder more nested than I expected, and actually the cd should be
/sdcard/2022-09-19/2022-09-19.2022-12-01, 12:05 PM:
I checked Material Files and internal-storage folder 2022-09-19-v1 has been created, so that's a good sign.
2022-12-02, 12:30 AM:
We're twelve and a half hours in. The first speech in this clip occurs two and a half minutes in. It hasn't outputted any progress to the terminal yet.
I'll let it run overnight mostly out of curiosity, but currently I expect that this device cannot materially contribute to a grid computer. I think tomorrow I'll revert Termux to that August backup again and update from there, freeing up the large quantities of space currently being spent on Whisper and its prerequisites.
The good news is that the phone is not appreciably warm, so I'm not frying my battery.
2022-12-02, 12:30 PM:
We're now at 24.5 hours real-time, and...huh, 11.5 minutes. It did actually manage something.
Still, it looks like my initial hypothesis (before multi-threading) that the phone's effectiveness would be roughly on par with the TV brain was right, and I agree with yesterday-me that it's not worth including this in my available compute.
Neat proof of concept, though.
Comment and Link Roundup: December 2, 2022
Dec. 2nd, 2022 07:14 pmComments on my own posts:
The one about Recoll
[cw: what it says on the tin] The one about plague nightmares [one comment, not counting the postscript]
[fairly mild cw: war, amnesia] The one about remembrance poppies
---
Comments on other people's posts:
[Substack; Wayback] (OP by Evan Þ) If you enjoy my posts in which I express wildly alien intuitions about things, you may enjoy me dipping my toes into a (very polite) discussion of free will. (At least, I assume these intuitions are wildly alien from how often I see people say things that only make sense under different intuition sets. In any case, we are pleased to offer the finest autoxenoanthropology here at Brinens and Things.) [two comments]
[cw: poverty, venting] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP bycatchymemes) In which I have a lot of psychological baggage around museums.
[cw: death, aging, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
treadwells) Cottagecore and a broader view of danger.
[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP bymindstalk) The hole in comparative social-media discussions left by ignorance of Tumblr.
[cw: food, poison, illness, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byultraviolet-divergence) Dealing with the latest big listeria outbreak.
[cw: (strong) illness, (strong) apocalypse, bugs] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP bysiderea; in response to ewt) The wonders of PPE, climate-catastrophe edition.
[fairly mild cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byrustingbridges; in response to bulbous-oar) How to selectively prevent Android apps from accessing the Internet.
[Scribble Hub; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) Isekais and the importance of caution when carrying irreplaceable otherworldly technology.
[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byheadspace-hotel) Poetic meter and artistic instincts.
[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byreptile-ruler) Fighting Tumblr's slippage down the slope towards Internet silos.
[cw: illness, apocalypse, (arguably) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byeightyonekilograms; partly in response to sigmaleph) In the future, "zoonosis" will be a word everyone knows; knowing *where* they learned it is another matter. [two comments, sort of]
---
Links:
[Imgur; Wayback] Live wire-sculpture (not to be confused with live-wire sculpture).
[arguably cw: injury, embarrassment squick] [Hackaday; Wayback] (by Lewin Day) False positives on Apple's automatic car-crash 911 calling.
[CBS; Wayback] (by Phil Galewitz) Over-the-counter hearing aids now available in the United States.
(Although I am also having feelings about this sentence:
Only if you're getting ripped off, dude. Go to Costco. *So* glad we told the non-chain hearing-aid centre to go fuck themselves when they wanted six grand: the perfectly fine Costco hearing aids were CAD$1,800 *before* the $1,000 government subsidy. (that's not even *counting* the refundable tax credits I might be able to wring out of it))
[Kiwix; Wayback] What is the size of Wikipedia? (Also, your regular reminder that Kiwix is amazing and you should check it out. (And it gets even *better* than amazing after you figure out how to make your own ZIM files.))
[AO3; Wayback] (byEdonohana; h/t Ozy Brennan) The intricacies of tardigrade literature.
[cw: what it says on the tin] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (bysiderea) Stop relying on Twitter for third-party authentication.
[cw: what it says on the tin] [Science; Wayback] (by Arevalo et al; h/tKelseyTUOC) A 20-valent influenza vaccine, containing examples of every known flu subtype. Works well in mice and ferrets, soon to be tested in primates and--hopefully--humans. In addition to the obvious benefits, it shows promise of providing cross-protection against novel influenza strains.
Three laugh-rule entries:
[cw: corporate bullshit] [Twitter; Wayback] (byrahaeli) Sporking the Cohost terms of service.
[Youtube; Wayback] (by Lauren Lopez and Robert Manion; h/t Blazing Darkness) Bella Swan is sixteen, going on seventeen...
[cw: scopophobia, (arguably) corporate bullshit] [Reddit; Wayback] (h/ttrivialagent) It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.
The one about Recoll
[cw: what it says on the tin] The one about plague nightmares [one comment, not counting the postscript]
[fairly mild cw: war, amnesia] The one about remembrance poppies
---
Comments on other people's posts:
[Substack; Wayback] (OP by Evan Þ) If you enjoy my posts in which I express wildly alien intuitions about things, you may enjoy me dipping my toes into a (very polite) discussion of free will. (At least, I assume these intuitions are wildly alien from how often I see people say things that only make sense under different intuition sets. In any case, we are pleased to offer the finest autoxenoanthropology here at Brinens and Things.) [two comments]
[cw: poverty, venting] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[cw: death, aging, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by
mindstalk) The hole in comparative social-media discussions left by ignorance of Tumblr.[cw: food, poison, illness, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[cw: (strong) illness, (strong) apocalypse, bugs] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by
siderea; in response to ewt) The wonders of PPE, climate-catastrophe edition.[fairly mild cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[Scribble Hub; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) Isekais and the importance of caution when carrying irreplaceable otherworldly technology.
[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[cw: illness, apocalypse, (arguably) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
---
Links:
[Imgur; Wayback] Live wire-sculpture (not to be confused with live-wire sculpture).
[arguably cw: injury, embarrassment squick] [Hackaday; Wayback] (by Lewin Day) False positives on Apple's automatic car-crash 911 calling.
[CBS; Wayback] (by Phil Galewitz) Over-the-counter hearing aids now available in the United States.
(Although I am also having feelings about this sentence:
A pair of prescription devices typically sells for {{USD}}$2,000 to $8,000.
Only if you're getting ripped off, dude. Go to Costco. *So* glad we told the non-chain hearing-aid centre to go fuck themselves when they wanted six grand: the perfectly fine Costco hearing aids were CAD$1,800 *before* the $1,000 government subsidy. (that's not even *counting* the refundable tax credits I might be able to wring out of it))
[Kiwix; Wayback] What is the size of Wikipedia? (Also, your regular reminder that Kiwix is amazing and you should check it out. (And it gets even *better* than amazing after you figure out how to make your own ZIM files.))
[AO3; Wayback] (by
[cw: what it says on the tin] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by
siderea) Stop relying on Twitter for third-party authentication.[cw: what it says on the tin] [Science; Wayback] (by Arevalo et al; h/t
Three laugh-rule entries:
[cw: corporate bullshit] [Twitter; Wayback] (by
[Youtube; Wayback] (by Lauren Lopez and Robert Manion; h/t Blazing Darkness) Bella Swan is sixteen, going on seventeen...
[cw: scopophobia, (arguably) corporate bullshit] [Reddit; Wayback] (h/t
Tags:
- 101uses for infrastructureless computers,
- adventures in human capitalism,
- advertising,
- animals: birds,
- animals: mosquitoes,
- art,
- cohost,
- disappointed resident of the future,
- dreams,
- fanfic,
- food,
- fun with loopholes,
- in which brin has food poisoning phobia,
- juxtaposition,
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(no subject)
Jul. 18th, 2022 10:07 pmThis is a callout post for LITE 92 for cutting off "American Pie" after the third chorus.
Play the full eight and a half minutes, you cowards.
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(I once had a radio force me to listen to the entirety of "Light My Fire", and I feel that getting a proper "American Pie" would be fitting compensation.)
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I was *enjoying* showing off that I know all the words, goddammit
Play the full eight and a half minutes, you cowards.
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(I once had a radio force me to listen to the entirety of "Light My Fire", and I feel that getting a proper "American Pie" would be fitting compensation.)
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(part 2)
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How did nobody ever tell me there was a long-distance text-based communication method temporally between the telegram and the fax machine?
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How did nobody ever tell me there was a long-distance text-based communication method temporally between the telegram and the fax machine?
Comments on my own posts:
[arguably cw: ableism] The one about the term "hyperfixation" [two comments]
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Comments on other people's posts:
[cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP byprokopetz) Suspiciously polished websites shilling for fellow suspiciously polished things. (Update: Dad and I (and maybe Brother) are going to give a cloud-free RoboVac to Mom as a joint gift on the first night of Hanukkah.)
[cw: food, unsanitary] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sojournthemoon, a fictional character whose author isluminousalicorn) Obstructed melioration: not just for Amentans. [two comments, sort of]
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Links:
[mild cw: apocalypse] [The Prepared; Wayback] (by Josh Centers) Ever wanted to email people over a radio transceiver? (Since you're reading *my* blog, I'm guessing you probably have.) Turns out it's possible! Takes hundreds of dollars of equipment, a ham license, a pain-in-the-ass setup process, and an agreement not to use encryption of any kind when communicating this way, but if you're sufficiently determined it *can* be done!
(Am *I* sufficiently determined? Not at the moment. A future me with less on her plate might be, though, if a better method hasn't come along by then.)
There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.
( Read more... )
[arguably cw: ableism] The one about the term "hyperfixation" [two comments]
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Comments on other people's posts:
[cw: corporate bullshit] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by
[cw: food, unsanitary] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sojournthemoon, a fictional character whose author is
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Links:
[mild cw: apocalypse] [The Prepared; Wayback] (by Josh Centers) Ever wanted to email people over a radio transceiver? (Since you're reading *my* blog, I'm guessing you probably have.) Turns out it's possible! Takes hundreds of dollars of equipment, a ham license, a pain-in-the-ass setup process, and an agreement not to use encryption of any kind when communicating this way, but if you're sufficiently determined it *can* be done!
(Am *I* sufficiently determined? Not at the moment. A future me with less on her plate might be, though, if a better method hasn't come along by then.)
There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.
( Read more... )
Tags:
- 101uses for infrastructureless computers,
- adventures in human capitalism,
- affini compact,
- amenta,
- autism,
- disappointed resident of the future,
- domesticity,
- in which brin has a job,
- in which brin has food poisoning phobia,
- juxtaposition,
- language,
- medical: diseases,
- medical: diseases: covid19,
- our roads may be golden‚ broken‚ lost,
- proud citizen of the future,
- reactionblogging,
- roundups,
- sexuality and lack thereof,
- the blue i see and the blue you see,
- the more you know
--how diversity keeps us from missing the obvious
[cw: illness, (arguably) infohazards in link]
( Read more... )
[cw: illness, (arguably) infohazards in link]
( Read more... )
In which *some* but not *all* podcasts use auto-transcripts, so you can't immediately disregard something for being a podcast.
I was hoping Just Plain Wrong had a text version. :(
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Listen Notes informs me that Google is willing to run their auto-transcriber on anything played through Google Chrome (not just Youtube videos), but 1: fuck Google Chrome, and 2: it sounds like it only *captions* rather than transcribing per se, so a 36-minute episode would require 36 minutes of hanging around watching for each new word/line to pop up (as opposed to dumping the audio into a processing queue, going off to do other things, and getting all the text at once later).
I was hoping Just Plain Wrong had a text version. :(
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Listen Notes informs me that Google is willing to run their auto-transcriber on anything played through Google Chrome (not just Youtube videos), but 1: fuck Google Chrome, and 2: it sounds like it only *captions* rather than transcribing per se, so a 36-minute episode would require 36 minutes of hanging around watching for each new word/line to pop up (as opposed to dumping the audio into a processing queue, going off to do other things, and getting all the text at once later).
